I like to have something like the following in AGENTS.md:
## Guiding Principles - Optimise for long-term maintainability - KISS - YAGNI
Or worse: for not relying as much as possible to the AI who apparently can write just as bad code but faster!
A subtle detail: you speak of coders, not software engineers. A SWE's value is not his code churning speed.
Acting like people can't be good at their job is frankly dehumanizing and says a lot about your mindset with how you view other fellow devs.
Maybe that's "the manager's job", but that's just passing the buck and getting a worse solution. Every level of management should be looking for the best solution.
The key insight is that the AGENTS.md becomes a kind of "engineering culture in a file". When you onboard a human engineer, you hope they absorb the team's values over time. With AI, you can encode those values upfront.
The challenge is that principles need to be specific enough to be actionable. "Write simple code" is too vague. "Avoid single-use wrapper functions" (from the sibling comment) is better - it's enforceable.
So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"
instruction.md is the new intern.
So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"
instructions.md is the new intern.
